First of all let’s get one thing clear: Most bloggers and blog readers expect to find a categories list on a blog and most blog platforms do provide category lists if needed. Although most blogs do show categories the other two terms in common use are tags and labels.
Technorati and many other sites use tags. Blogger uses labels, but it doesn’t matter what they call them as they all perform the same function. They help you to find posts on the subject in which you are interested.
Just a short one today to explain why I have added word definitions to the blog.
I know that many of those who have visited this blog have come from all round the world and it occurred to me that, for many, English was not their first language. It is possible that some may occasionally have trouble if I thoughtlessly use less familiar words than most of those, whose first language is English, would use in their everyday conversation.
So I looked around and discovered The Free Dictionary, which has, not only an English dictionary, but also dictionaries in French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian, Greek and Russian.
Many years ago a large part of my job was teaching the trainers in my area to teach. Near the start of each course I would show a flipchart with the words:
"Eschew Obfuscation"
written large. These words immediately did what I was telling them not to do. That is; avoid confusing your trainees by using long obscure technical words or the jargon you have become accustomed to using amongst your colleagues. However, it did make them sit up and pay attention.
If you want people to find your blog then there is a lot you can do to help this happen. It all comes under the heading of Search Engine Optimization, SEO as it is generally known.
There are whole blogs and websites dedicated to SEO and a simple search for SEO will find many of them. One of the tools you can use is meta description and keyword tags in the head of your blog template.
Sometimes you will see advice that it’s no longer worth using these because search engines no longer take any notice of them. This was brought about by web designers and site owners stuffing the keyword lists to try and trap anyone who entered any word at all into the search engine.
See also: Moving the Blog Archive Count in Third Party Templates
As we know there have been problems with the feeds in third party templates because Blogger have made changes to the coding for their feeds. In a previous post I covered, in detail, the method I used to replace them with new Blogger compliant feeds for the Blogging Pro template used for this blog. Since then I have found that the same method works for other templates. The only difference is in the styling details for each template.
Another problem has raised its ugly head: the Blog Archive which will not expand. This is relatively easy to fix as all it requires is a straight replacement of the existing Blog Archive with a new one.
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